The Church Has Guns

It's interesting to see how people think of pastors. Overseers are really priests of priests. For the most part, they function the same as the priests in the Old Testament who teach the people of God's instructions and administer the sacrifices, applying them to the people and pronouncing them either clean or unclean, i.e., acceptable to be present in the community and partake of God's protective care or not acceptable, and therefore, to be placed outside the camp.

However, what people usually think of when they think of pastors today is largely similar to how they think of Jesus. For most American Christians this means seeing Jesus as a Mr. Rogers figure who is there to listen to them, give them great advice for living, and then to stay out of their business. Certainly, they are not to make any judgments about a person's salvation/cleanliness/fitness to be considered a member of the kingdom.

Instead, pastors in the American imagination are really nice, non-judgmental people, positive thinking, encouragers who are like Jesus, as long as Jesus looks like Mr. Rogers that is. One might imagine some stoic or friendly monk who, when not smiling and shaking hands with everyone, spends his time singing to birds and butterflies while he walks through a tranquil garden of blooming flowers.

Of course, this is the church on satanic sedatives. It's been drugged to think this way by a culture bent on taming the Lord Jesus Christ and His ministers. In reality, Christ is a shepherd and so are His elders. That's why they are called pastors, i.e., "shepherds." A shepherd both nurtures sheep and exercises authority over them to keep them safe. He also violently roots out wolves parading themselves around to be sheep as they devour other sheep with bad theology or ethics that destroy the flock, and Christ does this through His ministers, not in spite of them.

In Exodus 32:25-29, in response to the sin of people in the assembly of God, Moses relates the command of God to the Levites to go kill their closest friends and relatives for their evil.
  
Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him. Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”

In Numbers 25:1-13, those who shepherd Israel are to kill a huge amount of them. Phineas, a priest, is praised for his killing of an Israelite man engaged in gross sin known to all of the people.

While Israel was staying in Shittim, the men began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women, who invited them to the sacrifices to their gods. The people ate the sacrificial meal and bowed down before these gods. So Israel yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor. And the Lord’s anger burned against them. The Lord said to Moses, “Take all the leaders of these people, kill them and expose them in broad daylight before the Lord, so that the Lord’s fierce anger may turn away from Israel.” So Moses said to Israel’s judges, “Each of you must put to death those of your people who have yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor.” Then an Israelite man brought into the camp a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the tent of meeting. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped; ⁹ but those who died in the plague numbered 24,000.
The Lord said to Moses,  “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal. Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him. He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.”

These are verses the American church tries to avoid. They try to dismiss them as the Old Testament God, as though God has changed His mind about sin in the New Testament, or that Christ now doesn't remove the evil man from among us because Jesus is all about forgiveness even without repentance.

However, since the Church is spiritual Israel, we would expect its shepherds to be the spiritual version of these priests and judges. Whereas the Church is not a physical nation, it does not deal out physical death for the crimes of wicked members of the visible covenant community. Instead, its shepherds employ a spiritual execution the church refers to as excommunication. The shepherd carries a sword, or in our day, a gun, a spiritual one with which he executes the wolves in sheep's clothing. 

This spiritual gun is the judgment of the elders. In Matthew 18:15-20, Christ lays out discipline when one sins personally against another.

“If your fellow Christian sins, go and point out their error, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector. “Truly I tell you, whatever guilty verdict you give on earth will be the guilty verdict given in heaven, and whatever you declare innocent on earth will be considered innocent in heaven. “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

The two or three are the two or three witnesses agreeing that the person is unrepentant of his or her sin, and therefore, are to be put to spiritual death, i.e., excommunicated and handed over to the devil.

Notice that this, whatever the judgment of his ministers on such cases, is Christ's judgment. He has given such authority to His priests. They judge a professed believer to be unrepentant. They ask God to hand him over to Satan. And Christ says that the Father will do so, and that Christ is with them in their decision as well.

This is why Paul does this on a couple occassions, both in 1 Corinthians 5 and in 1 Timothy 1:18-20. This is done both to cleanse the community of communal guilt, as rebellion not only spreads like cancer or leaven, as Paul says, but also because sin in the camp defiles the whole community and makes it guilty before God, and to instill fear in the sinner, so that he feels the weight of the judgment of God as he is given over to the devil for destruction, so that it may lead to his repentance and cleansing as he is restored into the fellowship of God's people or to his final destruction.

What this means is that shepherds are nurturers through their feeding of the sheep and leading them to pure waters through the teaching of the Word, but that they are also warriors, policemen, soldiers, judges, executioners as a part of their protection of the larger flock, and even those individuals who rebel against Christ and still think they can proclaim themselves as Christians. 

Our culture loves the Mr. Rogers minister, but makes a joke out of the minsters they should actually fear with a godly fear. The church with Mr. Rogers at its guard is a disarmed church, and every villain and dark thing creeps into it. Christ spits such a church out of His mouth. But the true Church is armed with judgment in love for God's holiness and the holiness of His people, and it is only a joke in so far as one thinks God's damnation is a joke. Make no mistake of this nurturing entity called the church. It's leaders are patient and seek life rather than death, but it is, in fact, heavily armed. Every minister carries with him life and death, the protection and destruction of individuals. The Church has eternal food and water and shelter for the repentant soul. But the wicked who do not repent will meet God's wrath instead through it because the Church has guns.